It’s official…Today Samsung and NVIDIA have outed their latest Android 2.3 Gingerbread-powered device in the Galaxy smartphone (superphone?) family, which we now know will sport a 900 x480 4.19-inch “Super Clear” LCD display, Tegra 2 dual-core processor, front-facing 1.3mp camera, and a 5mp rear camera with LED flash that supports HD video recording. Full specs from the press release after the break.

The press release describes the Galaxy R as a”lightweight, slim and sleek metallic design, the GALAXY R Smartphone delivers incredible performance thanks to its Dual Core processor”… which is all true, but we can’t help but feel this device is specifically for those that don’t require everything packed into the obviously superior, but very similar, Galaxy S II. Either way, we aren’t complaining about having another powerful Android-based device on the market that resembles the S II.
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Nvidia’s quad-core test tablet code named “Kal-El” is set to launch in s tablet this coming fall. Kal-El’s speed, named after Superman, is said to be 5x the speed of the Tegra 2, Nvidia’s current dual-core CPU on the market.Nvidia tellsAndroidCentral:

“Project Kal-El-powered tablets are coming this Fall, and phones around the CES 2012 timeframe.”

That translates to phones in Spring or summer. Originally, Nvidia said at CES 2011 we were going to see the tablet in August, but we’ve learned to never go off a company’s timeframe. Will the Kal-El be dubbed Tegra 3?

Huang Jen-Hsun, Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO, predicts tablets will outperform mobile PCs five years from today, echoing a similar sentiment from UK fabless chip maker ARM Holdings. The Tegra revenue could even surpass Nvidia’s GPU business, he tells chatting with reporters at a Computex press conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The CEO dismissed Intel’s latest mobile strides by expressing pessimism about their re-newed focus on tablet and smartphone silicon. Taiwanese trade publication DigiTimes quoted Jen-Hsun as saying that “consumers do not care whether their products use x86- or ARM-based processor”, adding:

As for the impact bring by the tablet PC, Huang pointed out that PC and tablet PC each has its own unique functionality; therefore, the traditional notebook should not see any danger of being replaced. However, netbook, which does not have a full functionality as a traditional PC, is being impacted deeply by tablet PC.

Nvidia, of course, is betting big on ARM-branded processor designs (versus Intel’s desktop x86 and mobile Atom architectures) that dominate the smartphone industry and are slowly but surely becoming a norm in the tablet space. Tegra chips typically combine ARM processing cores and Nvidia’s custom graphics cores. Even the iPad’s A5 chip is custom-designed around ARM’s CPU blueprints and the graphics unit licensed from Imagination Technologies. Nvidia’s technology roadmap is pretty convincing and they’ve been working their way up the mobile chain. The company is set to become the leading silicon provider for mobile gadgets…

For all the talk about the graphical prowess of so-called supertablets coming later this year with Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chip inside, we’ll have to do for the time being with the old-fashioned Tegra 2 devices. That may not be such a bad deal, because Nvidia’s dual-core Tegra 2 is a capable piece of silicon that can produce some remarkable visuals.

TouchArcade pointed at Shadowgun, a Madfinger-produced game for Android devices that takes full advantage of the Tegra 2 chip, courtesy of the Unity engine. The video you see above shows console-quality graphics running natively on a Tegra 2-based Android tablet. And yes, Apple fans, it’s coming to the iPad/iPhone near you as well. Another in-game video follows below.